Dolphin Awareness Month | A Different Way of Knowing

Image: George Karbus

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that in 1953. Most people read it as a philosophical puzzle.

For most of the twentieth century, we treated it as one. The question we asked about dolphins was: do they have language? It is an honest question, asked with genuine wonder. But it’s built on a quiet assumption — that communication is something you can decode, and that wherever intelligence lives, there is a lexicon waiting to be found.

John C. Lilly, the neuroscientist and psychonaut who spent the 1960s trying to teach dolphins English in a flooded laboratory in the Virgin Islands — and who, as the decade wore on, began conducting his research increasingly under the influence of LSD — believed this completely. He was so convinced that dolphins were trying to talk to us in something translatable that he dedicated years, and ultimately his scientific reputation, to finding the codebook. What he found instead, perhaps without realizing it, was the limit of his own frame.

In Their World

Atlantic spotted dolphin and white-beaked dolphin vocalizations, rendered as wavelets by Mark Fischer— each sound a different shape.

The frame has since shifted. Not because we gave up on understanding dolphins, but because we started asking a different question — not “do they speak?” but “what does it mean to live inside sound the way we live inside light?”

The shift came not from a laboratory but from the water itself. Beginning in 1985, marine biologist Denise Herzing did something that seems obvious in retrospect but was genuinely radical at the time — she got in the ocean with a specific community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas and stayed there, summer after summer, for decades. No tanks, no controlled conditions, no attempt to bring the dolphins into our world. Just sustained, patient observation in theirs.

Each dolphin develops a unique vocalization early in life — a signature whistle that functions like a name. They use it to announce themselves, to maintain bonds across distance, to call to one another across water where vision falters. A mother and calf separated in the open ocean will find each other by sound alone. These identity calls can carry for miles. The ocean, it turns out, is full of introductions.

But a name is only the surface. The closer researchers listen, the more it becomes clear that what dolphins are doing with sound may be far richer — and far more alien — than a system of names and calls. To understand it, you have to start with the medium itself.

What Vibration Carries

Water is a different medium entirely — 3,500 times denser than air, and far more generous with the sound that moves through it. Sound travels nearly five times faster here, and farther, and with a persistence that air never allows. Dolphins navigate it through echolocation, emitting ultrasonic clicks that return detailed information about objects, distance, density, and movement. The returning echoes resolve not as sound but as shape — a three-dimensional acoustic “image” of the world around them. They “see” with sound. And if they can perceive form through vibration, the question that follows is one science is only beginning to take seriously: what else might vibration carry?

Researcher Jack Kassewitz and acoustics engineer John Stuart Reid have been exploring this through a device called the CymaScope — a tool that visualizes sound by the way vibration interacts with water surfaces. When dolphin phonations are projected into it, they generate complex, consistent geometric patterns. Different sounds produce different forms. You can get a rough intuition for this in your own kitchen: fill a wine glass halfway, run a wet finger around the rim, and watch the surface of the liquid organize itself into intricate, finely etched rings.

What Kassewitz suggests goes further. These patterns may not just be a byproduct of sound. One possibility is that they are part of how sound is perceived — that dolphins, communicating through a medium that physically organizes itself in response to vibration, may be generating and reading patterns in water the way we read expressions on a face. Not a sequence of symbols, but something more spatial, more continuous, more their own.

Thirty Million Years, Then Us

The acoustic world dolphins now inherit — one that has no precedent in thirty million years of evolution. Photo: NOAA

Dolphins don’t just live in a world shaped by sound — they perceive, navigate, and know each other through it. Their acoustic environment is the medium of their entire existence. Which means that when we fill that medium with noise, we are altering the substrate of their perception.

The industrialization of the ocean has been, among other things, an acoustic event. Shipping traffic, sonar, seismic surveying, offshore construction — these sounds travel farther underwater than almost anything we produce on land, accumulating in coastal environments into a constant presence that has no precedent in the evolutionary history of any marine animal. Every generation of dolphins is navigating a different acoustic world than the one that shaped them.

OCR was founded to understand what that costs — not as an emergency response, though it is one, but as a long-term, rigorous investigation measured in the currency of the lives that depend on it. Understanding what dolphins are doing with sound is inseparable from understanding what we are doing to it.

We are developing an immersive sixteen-channel spatial audio environment where visitors can step inside a living California soundscape — from the whistle-filled superpods of common dolphins racing offshore to the distinct dialects of orca pods moving through the Monterey Canyon, to the rookeries of the Farallones — because we believe that before people will protect what they cannot see, they need to hear it.

Wittgenstein was right that we might not understand a lion if it spoke. What he could not have anticipated is that we might one day learn how to listen — and that what we might hear could change how we understand the minds that have been speaking all along.